Beyond Thunderdome
by CrackedShot
Summary: Mordecai makes a point. One shot.


Mordecai can feel the crowd outside. He can feel thier anticipation for action, thier bloodlust, thier desire to see if the bets they placed will come to fruition. He wants to check his gear again but doing so anymore would be redundant. Instead he strokes his beard and reminds himself why he's doing this.A small part of it is petty vengance, but there's much more at stake. He has point to make.

He was and is the Champion of the Thunderdome.

Just the thought of that word makes his mouth water, his throat dry, and his muscles taunt and ready for action. As always, his thoughts end up drifting to the past, and he lets them come to fuel his desire.

The first Thunderdome was his way to prove himself to everyone. No one thought they would make it out, and less than no one thought he would win. Even he didn't expect his Championship status, but he was good. Really good. He quickly won over crowds as the unbelievable underdog, he won over the Thunderdome like a hero, and then he qon Moxxi herself, and won was precisely the word for it. Thier relationship was one of conquest and and power, nothing else. They were crashing from the beginning, just happy to enjoy the ride. He didn't blame her for leaving, thier's was doomed from the start, but he did blame her for _who_ she left him for, _why_ she did it, and _how_ it happened. Some bastard comes into the Thunderdome, wipes the floor with his new fancy tech, and she throws Mordecai to the wind. For _Jack._ Oh yeah, he was still mad about that. He was even more pissed that when he heard about it, his first instinct was to get shitfaced and run into the Thunderdome trying to win her back. Only to get destroyed in the first round.

The wonders and joys of alcoholism.

Then Jack started his whole dictatorial holocaust thing, and while there was no logical correlation between Mordecai losing Moxxi to Jack and Jack deciding New Haven and by extension Pandora would look much nicer as a flat plane covered in burn marks and bloody craters, Mordecai couldn't help but feel responsible. Truth be told, he still felt that way.

"And now for the opening act," he hears Moxxi shout to the masses, "Mordecai!" The door opens to reveal the stunningly unchanged Torgue arena, now second Thunderdome. Mordecai steps into the light and walks toward the center to start the match. He grits his teeth in anger at being called an "opener" and ignores the booing crowd that only wants to see him get destroyed so they can watch Salvador and Krieg tag-team the match and ultimately betray one another. That's what they're here for, he's simply a way for Moxxi to wet thier appetite. _To bad_ , he thinks to himself, _I'm not going anywhere._

The buzzer sounds and Mordecai springs into action. He sprints away from the barren center and into the cover of the surrounding buildings. Slowly and methodically, he makes his way around the ring of buildings, memorizing the arena as he goes around and dispatching bandits as necessary. Once he is familiar with his surroundings, Mordecai clears out the remaining bandits as efficiently as possible. The crowd is booing at his survival and lack of spectacle, but they're engaged, and thats all that matters to Moxxi.

Wave two comes and it's Skags. They charge him and try to bite at his legs, but Mordecai had planned this round out long ago. He finds a decent choke point, crouches down so that the can't jump up at him and when he's halfway done mowing them down with what is probably the last functioning SS assault rifle left, he spares a second to glance at the queen of the Thunderdome herself, and the scowl she wears is euphoric to the hunter. It's well hidden behind her usual mask, but he can see the frustration. He didn't run, he wasn't losing, and he has a plan. And she _hates_ it.

Wave three and it's just as Mordecai expected: Psychos. He can feel that this was the wave he was supposed to lose on. There are more of them than he expected, and he never was great at the whole run and gun thing, but eventually he manages to out sprint the melee-obsessed mask wearers and the crowd is slowly coming onto his side. "Typical Mox," he muttered under his breath. Moxxi turnes to look at him from her pedestal above the arena, and Mordecai entertains the thought that she can somehow hear him.

"Cripple me with skags, then finish off the job with psychos? Come on Mox, you're better than that," he says while looting a supply drop. She turns from her glass tower to glare at him again, and Mordecai can't help the glee he feels knowing she can hear him.

The waves continue and it becomes more and more clear to the hunter how difficult it is for her to keep up her facade of jovial commentator to the audiance while attempting to kill him.

Wave five hits and it's almost boring how easy it is for him to take down Skagzilla. It's almost as if she forgot what a hunter was, or maby she hadn't expected him to get this far, but the quiet banter he lets out just to frustrate her and watch her faćade crack is the real prize.

Rounds two and three are a blur of easy waves and repetition, but Mordecai notices that Moxxi is planning something special for him, if the way she sends glares his way every second between muttering something he and the audiance can't hear and giving commentary that ranges from passive-aggressive to outright threats.

He reaches the final wave of round four with the crowd firmly switched onto his side when Moxxi pulls her first of many lowball moves by digi-structing Captain Filnt _and_ Pyro Pete for the boss round.

They come in from both sides, hoping to catch him in the empty space in the middle of the arena, but he pushes forward to confront the reconstructed pirate captain head on. He charges the man, his shield tanking Flint's machine gun fire and unloading with his pistol at that ridiculous helmet, hoping a round will meet it's mark. Just as he nears striking distance, a solitary bullet goes between the slits in his helmet. Flint roars, recoiling at the loss of his eye. Mordecai seizes the oppurtunity, jumps onto the overly large nomad's shoulders, and begins violently throttling his head and neck around until the behemoth falls to the ground, motionless.

In a moment Pete will be on him, so he has to run. Retreating into a narrow alleyway for cover, Mordecai frantically searches the god-awful HUD for his necessary equipment. Pete spots him from across the empty ring and starts charging. The hunter backpedals into the small passageway, throwing down proximity mines with one hand and spraying shock rounds from a Tediore sub gun with the other. As soon as the arsonist was in range of the mines he chucks the gun forward with all his might.

Suddenly he is flying, weightless through the air, hurtling violently into a suppourt beam. Then, with a bright flash of pain he was on his back. The world spins and doubles and is all to bright, but concussion-level hangovers are something of a speciality for the hunter, and he manages to sit himself up to see the disfigured corpse of Pyro Pete satisfyingly deconstruct before his eyes. He stands slowly and looks around for a falling insta-health.

None come. Neither do ammo supply drops.

Moxxi says something that Mordecai can't hear but causes the crowd to roar, and she shoots him a look, a look that says _you're not winning today and I'll be as unfair as I have to to see that happen._

Before the hunter is able to come up with a witty response the buzzer sounds and Round five is off. Even the first wave is brutal as he tries to land nothing but headshots with his combat rifle and remember all that boring garbage about grouping and trigger discipline Roland tried to teach him and all that other shit about conserving ammo. A grenade happily soars over his cover, forcing him out into the open where his shield is shredded and some shotgun pellets embed themselves into his right arn.

Switching his gun to his left he fires off a few potshots that conveniently find themselves in the skulls of the few remaining bandits. He reminds himself that he never believed in luck.

Mordecai drags himself into a nearby shed, slams the door behind him, and draws his revolver. A more poetic person would have come up with something about revenge or a last stand. Mordecai searches for an ambush point. The buzzer sounds and he braces for the torrent of skags that were sure to come and tear the shed apart and/or crash through the window in any moment while his "survivor" COM slowly stitches and covers the the hunters left shoulder.

"In the everlas-AAAGH!" a death scream rears and a buzz axe enbedds itself into the wall. Mordecai nervously checks the window for the source of the noise. He spots a Psycho chopping madly at several rabid skags before one of his friends joins the fun by gaely throwing himself into the fray, a live grenade in each hand, handily solving the problem without him.

Wave two and three spawned together. Mordecai sets his sniper rifle's barrel onto the windowsill of his shack and enjoys the show. As skags tear into psychos who explode skags which rabidly attack psychos who saw skags, he fires off the occasional potshots from his left side and the wave goes by smoothly. The moment Mordecai uses his last rifle round to forcibly remove all memories from the final hocky-mask-wearing digital construct, the buzzer sounds again.

"Badass wave!" Moxxi snarls and while the crowd can hear her, the venomous way she spat the word left no illusions in Mordecai's mind as to who she was talking to, or how pissed she was. A quick cycle through his arsenal yields eight revolver slugs, five shotgun shells, and a whole lot of nothing else.

Sighing, he grips his trusty six-shooter and bursts out from his hiding place. The two nearest bruisers are caught off guard and don't even have time to raise thier guns before a bullet forces its way into each of thier skulls.

Mordecai draws his shotgun and pumps a shell into the next bandit as he rounds the corner. He stumbles back but doesn't fall, so in his best Zer0 impression, Mordecai lunges forward, impales the man and uses his body as a shield from the hailstorm of smg rounds fired by the two followers. Switching back to his sidearm, he returns fire. His first shot misses his mark and the second man took two shots to bring down, but both fall eventually.

Four shells, one bullet, and four- no five more bandits. In the center ring Mordecai spots three of them spaced closely together. The tallest pulls a grenade from his jacket. Before he can release, Mordecai shoots the explosive. The grenade implodes, pulling the three men and another from a rooftop Mordecai had failed to see into a tight cluster before .hilariously flying through the air in disembodied chunks. Maby he really was lucky.

Just as the thought crosses his mind he fels immense pain from his back as several pellets tear through his shield and embed themselves into his flesh.

He lands hard on his front, the air forced out of him and apparently unable to be regained. The hunter painfully twists around and fires a shot blindly in the direction of his attacker. The final headless bruiser drops to the ground with and audible thud.

He sure feels lucky.

As if to better articulate his point the final buzzer shrieks into his ear and the curtain comes up, somehow only a couple meters fron his current position and Moxxi doesn't even have time to announce the final boss before the screaming and booing erupt into a hateful roar because this is _wrong_ and everyone knows it, because to summon even a fabrication of Wilhelm is beyond any level of pettieness and they all know it.

-

 _He's lying in bed with Moxxi, they'd just celebrated something and she's drawing gentle circles around bite marks as he confides his regrets to her because he's the kind of idiot that thinks relationships like thiers can last. "It's my fault Wlihelm got to New Haven, my fault Lil died._ " _She perks up, interested, but not so much as to stop him from talking. "We saw him comin_ _g, we had a plan. Roland and Brick hold the line up front, Lil evacuates the people, and I was suppourt fire. We were ready."_

 _She perks up slightly, interested in a way that he always mistook for genuine emotion, instead of the recognition of oppurtunity that it was. "I... I wasn't good enough. They had Wilhelm on the ropes, but I couldn't keep all those asshat robots off em'. She rounded back to help me_ , _and when that phasewalk thing of her's ended, it was like a flare. They saw us, the whole tower blew up. Knocked my ass out. When I came to, she was the only thing keeping Wilhelm from the town, from me."_

 _"There wasn't even enough to bury, I checked."_

There was, of course, logically speaking, time in between Mordecai bleeding on all fours and Mordecai getting his ribs crushed by Wilhelm's massive fist, and probably even more time between Mordecai getting his ribs crushed by Wilhelm's massive fist and Mordecai shoving his sword through Wilhelm's stupid fucking eye-monacle-thing, but to him it was a single, solitary, moment of psychotic adrenaline-fueled rage. The bastard fell to the ground, dead within seconds and the crowd was a cacophony of cheers and tunnel vision to the hunter. He sucked in a breath, his lungs screaming in firey protest as he pried himself up. He had to stand. To win the round he _had_ to stand up. Bracing himself on Wilhelm's bloody corpse, slowly, the Champion of the Thunderdome rose to his crowd. Staring out through the fading color and creeping darkness of his vision, the hunter locked eyes with the woman above the stadium. He smiles a wicked smile and levels his revolver at his prey's head.

 _Click._

He curses under his breath, tosses the gun into the dirt, and limps out the door. He hears the loot drop, hears her reluctantly, hatefully, announce him as the winner, and he keeps going. This wasn't about the loot, ot the money, or the crowd, or the glory, and it was only partly about petty vengance. This was about making a point.

He was and is the Champion of the Thunderdome.

Lilith is outside to greet him and help him into the technical where Zedtends to his wounds, making clucking noises of dissaproval whenever he finds a part of him thats particularly destroyed. The vehicle starts up and blue sky rolls past his vision. Zed motions for him to sit up and begins tending to the wounds on his back. "Quite a show," she remarks, even though he knows she didn't watch. Bloodsport wasn't much to watch once you've lived it, and they've all had their fill of watching friends get shot.

"Killed Wilhelm," he mumbles quietly enough that no one should have heard him over the sound of the technical. Still, Zed tenses up and a certain static is in the air that he has come to know as the "Lilith gets jumpy and starts sweating magic Siren energy" fragrance, No. 5.

"I'm sorry Lil, sorry about New Haven, Roland, all of it."

She makes a vauge sound that Mordecai decides to interpret as forgiving. It's not much, but it's all he'll ever get. It's nice.

-

 **A/N:** l'm taking classes but as of the moment Yo espanól es muy malo, which is why Mordecai doesn't think or speak in that hybrid way he usually does. Tell me what you think, espically about the present tense writing and the bad action scenes, because I need help. Have a great day...


End file.
